Never before had I beheld so vast an extent of treeless ground. The other prairies over which we had journeyed were dwarfed in my mind by the one now before me. I seemed to be standing upon the shore of a rigid sea—an ocean, whose motionless waves of short brown grass appeared to lie in a vast torpor up to, and beyond, the sunset itself; and this sense of enormous space was heightened by the low but profound murmur of the wind, as it swept by our standpoint, from vast distance, into distance still as vast.
The whole of the following day was spent in preparations for crossing this great waste. A quantity of dry poplar sticks were cut into lengths suitable for packing upon the sleds.
The fire in the leather tent was kept briskly going, and a good supply of gelettes was baked before it.
“We will need all the wood we can carry with us,” said the Sioux, “for the work of boiling the morning and evening kettle.”
When the sunset hour had again come, I was out again upon the hill top to watch the sun set over the immeasurable waste. My wanderings had taught me that it was at this hour of sunset that the wilderness put on its grandest aspect; and often was it my wont to watch its varying shades, as, slowly sinking into twilight, the vagueness of night stole over the prairie.
It was at these times of sunset, too, that I seemed to see again all the well-remembered scenes of my early days in the old glen. Out of the vast silent wilderness came the brown hill of Seefin, and the gorse-covered sides of Knockmore. I could fancy that my ear caught the murmur of the west wind through the heather. How far off it all seemed—dreamlike in its vividness and its vast distance!
Very early next morning the tent was struck, the horses were driven in, loads packed, and all made ready for the launch of the little expedition upon the great prairie sea.
The Sioux led the advance. Long ere mid-day the last glimpse of the Trois Arbres had vanished beneath the plain. In the afternoon a snow-storm swept across the waste, wrapping earth and heaven in its blinding drift. Still the Indian held his way at the same steady pace.
“It is well,” he said to me as I rode close behind him. “If there are any roving bands on the borders of this great prairie, they will not see us in this storm.”
Before sunset the storm ceased, the clouds rolled away to the south, and the boundless plain lay around us on all sides, one dazzling expanse of snow.